Conventional wood burning fireplaces or hearths have been used in buildings and homes for hundreds of years. These fireplaces have been designed to accomplish multiple purposes, but the two primary purposes are to provide heat within the building, and to provide an aesthetically pleasing light source. While wood burning fireplaces have been highly suitable aesthetic light sources, they are often inefficient as a heat source. The primary reason for this is that the heat generated by the burning wood is dispersed in multiple directions.
Wood burning fireplaces are also problematic in that the use of wood in a home can soil a room with soot, ash, and other pollutants, including vapor-borne products of combustion.
Natural gas burners, or liquid propane-gas (LPG) fired burners, eliminate much of the mess of a natural wood burning fireplace. However, such gas burners are still less efficient than desirable in converting the energy that is contained within the gas fuel, into heat that is projected into a room.
The relative inefficiency of conventional wood- and gas-burning fireplaces is an increasingly expensive problem, given the recent sharp increases in the cost of wood, fossil fuels, and other competing energy sources. Increasing energy demand from populous, underdeveloped, rapidly growing countries is likely to maintain upward pressure on energy prices.
It is believed that some inefficient conventional wood burning fireplaces remove more heat from a room than they produce. Heat losses arise when much of the heat energy caused by the burning of the wood is discharged through the chimney. Much heat from a room may be lost when fireplaces pull cold, outdoor ambient air into the house, through small gaps around windows and doors. Particularly at the beginning and end of the fire in the fireplace, these convective heat losses are larger than the radiant heat provided by that fire.
Further, the masonry walls and structures of which most fireplaces are constructed are very poor thermal insulators. This masonry is warmed by the fire and by the heated air within a room, and then conducted up through the chimney structure, and to the outside of the home. This effect further decreases the efficiency of a typical home fireplace.
These are among the reasons that the heating efficiency of such fireplaces is extremely low. Typically, as a result, a vertical-back fireplace with an open front is perhaps only ten percent efficient in converting wood to energy, and then delivering that energy into a surrounding room.
Gas burning fireplaces vary in their efficiencies. Some gas burning fireplaces are only slightly more efficient than wood-burning fireplaces. Manufacturers have devised various means for increasing the efficiency of gas-burning fireplaces. It is believed by the inventor that the typical gas-burning fireplace, however, nevertheless has a limited efficiency, particularly about 40%-42%.
The present invention is provided to solve some of the problems discussed above, and other problems, and to provide advantages and features not provided by prior gas-fired burners of this type.
What follows is a full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention, along with explanatory drawings.